Monday, November 16, 2009

In Jaunty you were used to shutting the laptop's lid and trusting it would go to sleep... Well, not any more in Karmic. I've already done it several times only to find out that the poor laptop was cooking in its bag, or just shut itself down after running out of batteries.

The problem is related to a massive refactoring of gnome-power-manager, which now uses the devicekit-power daemon instead of the recently deprecated hal. Particularly, the problem has to do with the inability of devkit to determine whether we're on AC or battery reliably.

Looks like there are some memory leaks in the new Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic):

I just took this snapshot of the system monitor after seeing how my swap space is half full, trying to find a culprit. It shows the processes running on my computer after 5 days uptime... I'm just capturing the top hogging processes, ie. the ones that have allocated over 100 MB of virtual memory. Ok, we all know about Firefox's soft spot for memory when you have 30 tabs opened... We also know that it's normal for Xorg to join the feast, but what are gdm-simple-slave and gdm-simple-greeter doing here, taking about as much as firefox altogether??

We also excuse evince because it's dealing with some graphics. I don't know what two metacities are good for, and last but not least, gnome-power-manager (yeah, the tiny little battery icon that also takes care of suspending, etc.) is munching on another 100 MB. WTF?

If you are a fan of the TV series LOST, you probably know that the addiction to it comes partly from the directors' mastery of solving a mistery while puzzling you with three more on each episode. I believe the Ubuntu team applied this very same concept to the bugfixing process, so that users are constantly eager for a new release.